AWAKENING INDIA
The promise and pitfalls of Indian foreign policy
Two episodes in the first week of June starkly illustrate both the promise of Indian foreign policy and the pitfalls it faces as a result of the country’s increasingly toxic domestic political culture.
India’s Covid Con
India is no stranger to political controversies. At least half a dozen rage in its fractious public life at any time. But perhaps the most unseemly dispute recently has been the one over the country’s Covid-19 mortality figures.
What is India doing in Ukraine?
The Ukraine war has exposed India’s strategic vulnerabilities in a tough neighbourhood as arguably nothing else could, raising fundamental questions about the country’s global position and regional security.
India’s Chauvinist Crusade
The restrictive, illiberal trend that has come to characterise India over the last five years has a new data point.
Column by Shashi Tharoor: Modi’s Anti-Muslim Jihad
After India’s recent defeat by Pakistan at the T20 Cricket World Cup tournament, Indian bowler Mohammed Shami faced vicious trolling on social media.
India’s Taliban Problem
In the weeks since the Taliban’s theocratic terrorists returned to power in Kabul, the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women and girls, have been subjected to unimaginable suffering as the world’s attention turns to other issues. But many other countries, and especially India, have reason to worry.
Among India’s Believers
It is rare for a public-opinion survey to shake established perceptions of a country in the way a recent Pew Research Center study of religion in India has done. The revelations in Pew’s comprehensive survey, based on interviews with 30,000 adults in 17 languages between late 2019 and early 2020, have astonished many.
India’s Taliban Dilemma
“The future of Afghanistan cannot be its past,” India’s External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar had told a meeting in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, on July 14. It is precisely the spectre of a rerun of the Taliban rule in Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001 that has been firmly raised with its swift military surge across much of that country in the last few months.
India's Big Leaky Data
India has no coltan or rare earths, little oil, and not enough water. What it does have is people—1.3 billion and counting. That makes
Beyond the smoke and mirror
"History,” Winston Churchill said, “will be kind to me, for I intend to write it myself.” He needn't have bothered. He was one of the great mass murderers of the 20th century, yet is the only one, unlike Hitler and Stalin, to have escaped historical odium in the West. He has been crowned with a Nobel Prize (for literature, no less), and now, an actor portraying him (Gary Oldman) has been awarded an Oscar.
India's culture war comes to Bollywood
Culture and history have become new battlegrounds in India. Debates over the Taj Mahal's position as a symbol of multicultural India have yet to be settled, yet the nation is already being torn apart further by another cultural controversy—this time, over a film.
The Siege of the Taj Mahal
In a country where politics has turned toxic, leading virtually everything—from festival firecrackers to animal husbandry—to take on a “communal” religious colouring, perhaps it should not be surprising that even one of the world's most famous monuments has become a target. But that doesn't make it any less tragic—or destructive.
The two backlashes against globalisation
When I left India for graduate school in the United States in 1975, the word “globalisation” was not in use anywhere in the world.
The harsh truth about India's godmen
Late last month, when two Indian states and the national capital were held to ransom by rioting mobs protesting their spiritual leader's conviction on two counts of raping minor girls, many Indians found themselves confronting several painful truths about their country.
India, a land of belonging
Seventy years ago this month, at midnight on August 15, 1947, Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed India's independence from the British Empire. Nehru called it “a moment that comes but rarely in history, when we pass from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.” With that, the country embarked on a remarkable experiment in governance that continues to this day.
Why India should scrap parliamentary democracy
India's parliamentary system, inherited from the British, is rife with ineffiencies. By the logic of Westminster, you elect a legislature to form the executive, and when the executive does not command a secure majority in the legislative assembly, the government falls, triggering fresh elections.
The End of US Soft Power?
One major casualty of Donald Trump's victory in the bruising US presidential election is, without a doubt, America's soft power around the world. It is a development that will be difficult – perhaps even impossible – to reverse, especially for Trump.
India's prohibition hypocrisy
Last month, 18 people in the Gopalganj district of India's Bihar state died after consuming illicit alcohol, highlighting – once again – the peculiar relationship between morality and tragedy in India.